Posts tagged destruction
Call It What It Is: Energy of Mass Extinction
Mar 11th
by JACQUELINE MARCUS FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
It’s time for the public to start calling 19th century barbaric fossil fuels what it is: Energy of Mass Extinction. Dirty energy companies, including nuclear power plants, have been owned by a few rich white families from the start, which is why production of energy has remained in the Dark Ages even though clean renewable energy could have lit up the world easily, cheaply and without pollution twenty years ago. Given the latest advances in green energy technology, there’s absolutely no excuse for not legislating rapid shifts to clean energy by 2020.
Instead, world leaders, primarily the US government, not only serve as “barriers” to the advancement of green energy, they’re the fossil fuel industry’s sleaziest salesmen on earth: Big Oil pays for their seats on the Hill for the sole purpose of selling Energy of Mass Extinction to world markets. Oil executives are given an open door invitation to the White House any time and day of the week.
By contrast, lawyers that represent the public’s welfare and our environment are not welcomed, or they are put on a long waiting list. In short, the oil oligarchs operate from the White House where the polluters meet and draw up their plans. Judges are also owned by the oil firms. For example, read Buzzflash editor at Truthout Mark Karlin’s recent commentary about a federal judge that blocked U.S. courts from being used to collect a $9 billion Ecuadorean judgment against Chevron for turning a beautiful rainforest into a putrid toxic waste dump Thanks to a thoroughly corrupt US government, another victory for Chevron’s oil tyrants who don’t have to clean up the toxic sludge they leave behind after they’ve contaminated everything in sight for Energy of Mass Extinction.
In order to understand Obama’s plans for Energy of Mass Extinction, it’s worth reading two articles that appeared in the Rolling Stone: How the U.S. Exports Global Warming by Tim Dickinson. While Obama talks about shifting to a clean, green future, behind closed doors, he and his rich oil friends are selling tar-sands oil, black gunk refined to crude known as petroleum coke, which is denser and dirtier than burning coal—to world markets, mostly to China and Asian markets because it’s cheap fuel.
Too bad China won’t tell Obama to take his filthy tar-sands and shove it you know where, and that they’ll meet their energy demands with their advanced solar and wind technologies. But unfortunately, they’re buying it. And as long as there’s a demand, we will be doomed by these horrific decisions made by world leaders. Incidentally, “Hillary Clinton is even more supportive of the dirty-energy trade than the Obama White House.”
The second piece is Matt Taibbi’s The Vampire Squid Strikes Again. Thanks to deregulation going back to the Glass-Steagall Act under President Clinton, accelerated by Republican, Phil Gramm, banks have gone beyond financing dirty fossil fuel industries: they’re buying everything associated with the production of Energy of Mass Extinction for big profits.
When you read these two pieces together, you get a clear understanding of how oil firms, Wall St and the US government are buying and selling Energy of Mass Extinction in a blinding wheel of addiction to money while the earth is going up in flames. These people wouldn’t know a Redwood from a Palm tree. They’re completely divorced from nature. They are exactly what T.S. Eliot meant by the Hollow Men.
Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. hundreds of students are being arrested in front of the White House to protest against the Keystone Tar Sands Pipeline. Although these kids stepped over the line deliberately to get arrested for the sake of drawing attention to tar-sands Energy of Mass Extinction, to my mind, they were arrested to protect the oil industry.
While these kids are going to jail for trying to save a beautiful planet that is doomed from man-made pollution, the oil criminals continue to poison our drinking water, oceans, rivers, lands, and our air at mass levels of destruction. Are they getting arrested? No, they’re being wined and dined at the White House. As for the oil-owned media, as Buzzflash editor, Mark Karlin, pointed out, a huge, oil-funded PR campaign has been launched to push Obama’s approval of the northern Keystone leg from Alberta, Canada to the southern Keystone pipeline for delivery to the Gulf where it will be sold to China and Asian markets.
For example, it was disconcerting to see that HuffingtonPost Green published Warren Buffet’s cheerleading article for the Keystone pipeline. It’s one thing to post it in the business section, but to promote Buffet’s big push for the worst carbon emitting pollution on earth in the environmental section seemed terribly hypocritical at HuffPost Green. There’s one significant point that Buffet failed to mention in his article: that he plans to profit from his investment in the Keystone tar-sands pipeline. That’s how PR works: convince the public that oil (tar-sands) is good for them, when in fact, it only benefits a few billionaires like Buffet at the expense of life as we know it.
In my last Buzzflash-Truthout commentary, Who’s to Blame for Recurring Chemical & Oil Disasters, I made a reference to Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, The Sixth Extinction. Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker and also the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe. In The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert explains how our use of fossil fuels and the effects of climate change are creating a mass extinction of the planet. “We are effectively undoing the beauty and the variety and the richness of the world which has taken tens of millions of years to reach,” said Kolbert on a NPR Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross.
That’s why it’s important for the public to call dirty energy what it is: Energy of Mass Extinction; it’s a barbaric fuel that is sucking the life and light from our Planet Earth.
Dirty Energy is the real Weapon of Mass Destruction. These ruthless monsters are not going to change their ways as long as they can profit by the billions from annihilating the earth. Therefore, we must all make an effort to stop using and buying these deadly products to the best of our abilities. That’s what’s happening in Hawaii. Residents are opting out of the grid for solar and by doing so, making it impossible for the antiquated utility company (HECO) to stay alive. Read Hawaii’s top renewable energy advocate Henry Curtis’ piece U.S. Utilities Face Impending Doom with the Rise of Cheap Solar.
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Jacqueline Marcus is a contributing guest writer for Buzzflash at Truthout.org; she’s the editor ofForPoetry.com and EnvironmentalPress.com and author of Close to the Shore by Michigan State University Press. Her E-book, Man Cannot Live on Oil, Alone: Time to end our dependency on oil before it ends us, is available at Kindle Books.
Climate Protection: The New Insurgency
Dec 31st
Faced with the failure of conventional lobbying, the climate protection movement is now turning to mass civil disobedience—but we can take it further still.
By Jeremy Brecher, December 10, 2013.
This article is a joint publication of Foreign Policy In Focus and TruthOut. For a longer presentation, see the Foreign Policy In Focus report, “A Nonviolent Insurgency for Climate Protection?“
When 30 climate protestors from 18 countries protested drilling at an Arctic oil platform operated by Gazprom, they represented the people of the world taking a symbolic stand against climate destruction, the corporate climate destroyers, and the governments that back them. But the action of the Arctic 30 may be prophetic of something more: The emergence of a global insurgency that challenges the very legitimacy of those who are destroying our planet.
The 2013 Fifth Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed that humans are destroying the earth’s climate. But it also revealed something even more alarming: Twenty-five years of human effort to protect the climate have failed even to slow the forces that are destroying it. On the contrary, the rate of increase in carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels tripled between the release of the first IPCC report in 1988 and today.
Scientists and climate protection advocates once expected that rational leaders and institutions would respond appropriately to the common threat of climate change. As Bill McKibben said of Jim Hansen and himself, “I think he thought, as did I, if we get this set of facts out in front of everybody, they’re so powerful — overwhelming — that people will do what needs to be done.”
It didn’t work. Those who are fighting to save the climate need a new strategy. One such strategy to consider is a global nonviolent law-enforcing insurgency.
A nonviolent insurgency
Insurgencies are social movements, but movements of a special type: They reject current rulers’ claims to legitimate authority. Insurgencies often develop from movements that initially make no direct challenge to established authority but eventually conclude that one is necessary to realize their objectives. To effectively protect the earth’s climate and our species’ future, the climate protection movement may have to become such an insurgency.
The term “insurgency” is generally associated with an armed rebellion against an established government. Its aim may be to overthrow the existing government, but it may also aim to change it or simply to protect people against it. Whatever its means and ends, the hallmark of such an insurgency is to deny the legitimacy of established state authority and to assert the legitimacy of its own actions.
A nonviolent insurgency pursues similar objectives by different means. Like an armed insurgency, it does not accept the limits on its action imposed by the powers-that-be. But unlike an armed insurgency, it eschews violence and instead expresses power by mobilizing people for various forms of nonviolent mass action.
After closely following the massive strikes, general strikes, street battles, peasant revolts, and military mutinies of the Russian Revolution of 1905 that forced the czar to grant a constitution, Mohandas (not yet dubbed “Mahatma”) Gandhi concluded, “Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.” Shortly thereafter he launched his first civil disobedience campaign, proclaiming “We too can resort to the Russian remedy against tyranny.”
The powers responsible for climate change could not rule for a day without the acquiescence of those whose lives and future they are destroying. They are only able to continue their destructive course because others enable or acquiesce in it. It is the ordinary activity of people — going to work, paying taxes, buying products, obeying government officials, staying off private property — that continually re-creates the power of the powerful. A nonviolent climate insurgency can be powerful if it withdraws that cooperation from the powers-that-be.
Why a law-enforcing insurgency?
Faced with the failure of conventional lobbying and political “pressure group” activity, much of the climate protection movement is now turning to mass civil disobedience, as witnessed by the campaigns against the Keystone XL pipeline, mountaintop removal coal mining, coal-fired power plants, and Arctic oil drilling. Such civil disobedience, while generally recognizing the legitimacy of the law, refuses to obey it in specific instances.
Civil disobedience represents moral protest, but it does not in itself challenge the legal validity of the government or other institutions against which it is directed. Rather, it claims that the obligation to oppose their immoral actions — whether discriminating against a class of people or conducting an immoral war or destroying the climate — is more binding on individuals than the normal duty to obey the law.
A law-enforcing insurgency goes a step further. It declares a set of laws and policies themselves illegal and sets out to establish law through nonviolent self-help. Such insurgents view those who they are disobeying as merely persons claiming to represent legitimate authority — but who are themselves violating the law under what’s known as “color of law,” or the false pretense of authority. So “civil disobedience” is actually obedience to law and a form of law enforcement.
Social movements that engage in civil disobedience often draw strength from the claim that their actions are not only moral, but that they represent an effort to enforce fundamental legal and constitutional principles flouted by the authorities they are disobeying. And they strengthen a movement’s appeal to the public by presenting its action not as wanton law breaking but as an effort to rectify governments and institutions that are themselves in violation of the law.
For the civil rights movement, the constitution’s guarantee of equal rights meant that sit-inners and freedom riders were not criminals but rather upholders of constitutional law. For the struggle against apartheid, racism was a violation of internationally guaranteed human rights. For war resisters from Vietnam to Iraq, the national and international laws forbidding war crimes defined civil disobedience not as interference with legal, democratic governments but rather as a legal obligation of citizens. For the activists of Solidarity, the nonviolent revolution that overthrew Communism in Poland was not criminal sedition but an effort to implement the international human and labor rights law ratified by their own government.
These examples seem paradoxical. On the one hand, the movement participants appear to be resisting the constituted law and the officials charged with implementing it. On the other, they are claiming to act on the basis of law — in fact to be implementing the law themselves against the opposition of lawless states.
Law professor and historian James Gray Pope has developed a concept of “constitutional insurgency” to understand such cases. A constitutional insurgency, or what might be called a “law-enforcing insurgency,” is a social movement that rejects current constitutional doctrine but that “rather than repudiating the Constitution altogether, draws on it for inspiration and justification.” Pope detailed how the American labor movement long insisted that the right to strike was protected by the 13th amendment to the constitution, which forbade any form of “involuntary servitude.” Injunctions to limit strikes were therefore unconstitutional. Although courts disregarded this claim, the radical Industrial Workers of the World told its members to “disobey and treat with contempt all judicial injunctions,” and the “normally staid” American Federation of Labor maintained that a worker confronted with an unconstitutional injunction had an imperative duty to “refuse obedience and to take whatever consequences may ensue.”
Why climate destruction is illegal
The Justinian Code, issued by the Roman Emperor in 535 A.D., defined the concept of res communes (common things): “By the law of nature these things are common to mankind — the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.” The right of fishing in the sea from the shore “belongs to all men.”
Based on the Justinian Code’s protection of res communes, governments around the world have long served as trustees for rights held in common by the people. In U.S. law this role is defined by the public trust doctrine, under which the government serves as public trustee on behalf of present and future generations. Even if the state holds title, the public is the “beneficial owner.” As trustee, the state has a “fiduciary duty” to the owner — a legal duty to act solely in the owners’ interest with “the highest duty of care.” The principle is recognized today in both common law and civil law systems in countries ranging from South Africa to the Philippines and from the United States to India.
On Mother’s Day, 2011, the youth organization Kids vs. Global Warming organized the “iMatter March” of young people in 160 communities in 45 countries, including the United States, Russia, Brazil, New Zealand, and Great Britain. Concurrently, the Atmospheric Trust Litigation Project brought suits and petitions on behalf of young people in all 50 U.S. states to require the federal and state governments to fulfill their obligation to protect the atmosphere as a common property. Speaking to one of the rallies, 16-year-old Alec Loorz, founder of Kids v. Global Warming and lead plaintiff in the Federal lawsuit, said:
Today, I and other fellow young people are suing the government, for handing over our future to unjust fossil fuel industries, and ignoring the right of our children to inherit the planet that has sustained all of civilization. The government has a legal responsibility to protect the future for our children. So we are demanding that they recognize the atmosphere as a commons that needs to be preserved, and commit to a plan to reduce emissions to a safe level.
Loorz concluded: “The plaintiffs and petitioners on all the cases are young people. We are standing up for our future.”
A trustee has “an active duty of vigilance to ‘prevent decay or waste’ to the asset,” according to University of Oregon law professor Mary Christina Wood, whose new book Nature’s Trust: Environmental Law for a New Age lays out the legal basis for the suits. “Waste” means “permanently damage.” If the asset is wasted in the interest of one generation of beneficiaries over future generations, it is in effect an act of “generational theft.”
Although so far the courts have turned down most of these atmospheric public trust suits, the decisions are being appealed. On October 3, 2013, the Supreme Court of Alaska became the first state supreme court to hear such an appeal.
A global climate insurgency
Compelling as the logic of the atmospheric public trust argument may be, it is easy to imagine that many U.S. courts will refuse to force governments to meet such obligations. In a brief to dismiss the Kansas suit, lawyers called the claim “a child’s wish for a better world,” which is not something a court can do much about.
The sad fact is that virtually all the governments on earth — and their legal systems — are deeply corrupted by the very forces that gain from destroying the global commons. They exercise illegitimate power without regard to their obligations to those they claim to represent, let alone to the common rights beneficiaries of other lands and future generations to whom they also owe “the highest duty of care.”
But protecting the atmosphere is not just a matter for governments. Indeed, it is the failure of governments to protect the public trust that is currently prompting the climate-protection movement to turn to mass civil disobedience. Looked at from the perspective of the public trust doctrine, these actions are far from lawless. Indeed, they embody the effort of people around the world to assert their right and responsibility to protect the public trust. They represent people stepping in to provide law enforcement where corrupt and illegitimate governments have failed to meet their responsibility to do so.
When the climate protection movement uses nonviolent direct action to protect the public trust, it is often confronted by government officials acting under color of law to perpetuate climate destruction. The Arctic 30 were held at gunpoint, for example, and charged with piracy. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said, “Concern for the environment must not cover up unlawful actions.” A law-enforcing climate insurgency will answer: Concern for oil company profits must not cover up unlawful government complicity in destroying the atmospheric public trust.
Jeremy Brecher is co-founder and core team member of the Labor Network for Sustainability. He is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements and has received five regional Emmy awards for his documentary film work. An updated edition of his labor history Strike! (PM Press 2014) will include a new chapter on the working class mini-revolts of the 21st century.